My problem with Game of the Year lists

The end of the year means Game Of The Year lists, which always brings to mind the difference between the games I enjoy, and those which most of the gaming community enjoys. I think this year I finally figured out why I disagree with these lists so much: I’m officially done with video games as a storytelling medium.

Of course I don’t mean I’ll never play a game with a line of dialog again. But rather I am coming to view storytelling as a negative feature of most games. When I sit down to play a game, I want to enjoy an interactive experience, that tests my skill or challenges my problem solving abilities. If I wanted to experience a story, I would use a medium that does that far better than video games.

Last night I sat down to finally play the critically acclaimed What Remains of Edith Finch on PC. It’s a walking simulator, where you walk around a carefully crafted environment and listen to a narrator tell a story. I thought it had a promising start, I liked the way the subtitles were displayed. Neat trick. Forty-five minutes of walking through an empty forest and then an empty house, however, left me feeling pretty bored. The point at which I quit was when I was ineffectually attempting to capture rabbits as an owl. After the fourth failed dive, I realized I wasn’t enjoying the gameplay, and that watching an owl fail to catch a rabbit for five minutes is godawful storytelling. So I quit.

Edith Finch would make a far better book or movie. I feel like the game developers had some “ideal route” in mind when they created the game. They probably had to design the house such that it would be experienced in a certain order, with choke points to ensure the player hits critical story beats. It would be easier, and ensure a more compelling narrative, if the the authors had simply controlled the camera through the experience. Rather than watch an owl fail to catch a rabbit a bunch of times, they could just show the owl catching the rabbit and move on with the damn story. Controlling an owl with crappy gameplay does not improve the storytelling experience, in my opinion.

Why did Giant Sparrow decide to develop a game instead of a 3D animated movie, then? I don’t know, but I have some guesses. I think games are a much more forgiving medium for storytelling, precisely because it’s so bad at it. If you took a recording of a typical first gameplay experience and showed it to a movie-going audience, everyone would walk out after the fourth missed owl dive. But because games are terrible at telling stories, Edith Finch‘s narrative is given huge critical accolades, despite being a slog to experience. Video games also have lower graphical standards. Animated movies don’t have the excuse of realtime graphics to justify poor visuals. While Edith Finch‘s graphics are good for a video game, they’re nothing special in terms of pre-rendered animations. Finally, I think the competition in the narrative game market is smaller than that of the movie market, and the narrative game audience is much larger than that of the indie film genre. While Edith Finch‘s story may be great (I don’t know, I got bored and quit less than an hour into it), I don’t know that it would stand out in the crowded movie field, nor find an audience large enough to justify its cost as an indie film.

But enough harping on this one poor game. The fact that I bothered to try it puts it above most Game of the Year narrative slogs. At least Edith Finch doesn’t try to justify its being a game with exhaustively boring “game mechanics” like combing your horse, or picking up every flower in a giant, empty landscape in order to craft something. Unlike most GOTY candidates, where you might as well put the controller down and pick up some popcorn while the game plays a movie at you, Edith Finch also tells its story duringgameplay.

There is a really interesting intersection, though, where video games truly can be unique with regards to storytelling. This is when the story itself is a game mechanic. It’s rare and incredibly difficult to get right. Undertale manages, and is an amazingly written game with a very compelling story that intersects with the gameplay. “Choose your own adventure”-style is a combination of storytelling and gameplay. It’s super hard to do well, but a couple games manage. Oxenfree skirts the line, but the combination of creepy writing and visuals with choose-your-own storytelling ends up with a compelling gameplay experience that I don’t think you could separate from the medium. I think Deus Ex‘s branching narrative that intersected with decent gameplay managed this feat. It’s not that these games have incredibly deep stories. Rather, it’s the intersection of the gameplay with the story that makes the experience compelling. You couldn’t remove Undertale‘s story from the game and place it into a book. They’re intertwined, and that’s what makes it a good video game.

But more often the story is an unnecessary waste of time in otherwise excellent games. The Witness is one of my favorite games ever, with incredibly conveyed gameplay mechanics that really challenge the player. One of the only black marks on the game for me is that the author tried to jam a story into it via a clumsy, hidden “VR” narrative video. No one knows what this is intended to mean. You can find pages of theories discussing the video and how it may tie into other aspects of the island on Reddit. But there is no hint at all at what the author might have meant. It’s not critical analysis of a literary work, it’s reading entrails. It’s a total failure of storytelling, and in my opinion, the game is poorer for it. Luckily it’s mostly entirely ignorable.

On the other hand is game-of-the-year-candidate Celeste. A really excellent platformer, with charming graphics and great music. And pages and pages of dull-as-dirt text to slog through on your way through the otherwise excellent game. If you read reviews of Celeste you’ll find endless praise for its treatment of self-doubt and how the main character builds confidence by conquering the mountain. But I was skipping the dialog as fast as I could by the end of Chapter 3. I’m here to play a challenging platformer, not read a book.

So, yes, this is finally the breaking point for me. I’m done with storytelling in video games. I’m here to play games, not read a book or watch a movie. If you want me to watch a movie, make a movie. If you want me to read a billion lines of text, write a book. Those mediums are far better at telling stories than video games can ever be. The only reason story games are praised as highly as they are is because it is such a terrible medium for it that storytelling that would be shunned in any other medium is seen as a shining beacon of promise. Throw GTA5 in the trash and watch The Goodfellas. Throw Fallout 4 in the trash and read Ancillary Justice. Throw Read Dead Redemption 2 in the trash and read Lonesome Dove.

Give me good gameplay. Give me cool graphics. Give me awesome music. These are things games are good at, and things we should use to decide which games truly represent the pinnacle of the medium. This is I think the disconnect between me and the Game of the Year lists. Those lists seem to exclusively praise big budgets and games that would be lucky to be considered B-tier movies. I think that’s the opposite of what Game of the Year lists should be focusing on. Game of the Year lists should focus on what games can do well, and what artists are exploring the scope of medium.

To that end, here are some really good games I played that came out in 2018: Lumines Remastered, Return of the Obra Dinn, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and what I would consider my game of the year: Hollow Knight. These games don’t try to imitate other art forms, badly. Instead they are shining examples of what kinds of experiences only games can provide.